These last few days I have been dedicating my free time to restoring an old AT case I got a few weeks ago. The thing was in lamentable condition: rust, dirt, insects, goo, broken power button, broken turbo button, broken MHz LED display, and a horrible case of front cover yellowing. The only thing that works fine seems to be the 3 leds for power/turbo/HDD.

I could have scrapped it but I have some spares to restore it and seems like an interesting project to have this thing become the home of one of my caseless 486 motherboards.

I have replaced the MHz LED display with a working one I had and disassembled the case (including rivets) to sand away the rust and repaint during the weekend. Right now I'm working on the de-yellowing process for the front cover using peroxide-based cream. It has improved a lot, but it will need a few more sessions... hopefully I will be able to share the results with you when I'm done!

I bid on an midiman mm401 isa card and the bidding got a bit too crazy! I'll have to keep my eye out for another one...

Just rescued my games from my DOS PC. Hard drive had the click of death when I turned it on this evening. 🙁 Powered off and back on and it booted normally. Ran scandisk on the partitions and they were all fine. Powered PC off and moved hard drive to my main rig to copy my game saves off and it started clicking again. So I stuck the drive in the freezer for 10 minutes, and that didn't help. As a last resort, I smacked the corner closest to the actuator arm to try to free it up. Three reboot attempts later, it spun up and I was able to copy my games off. Woohoo! Even if I couldn't rescue it, my last backup was only a month old, so I would've just lost my last month's progress on Ultima Underworld. Thankfully, I got that back. 😎

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I bought a new 3.6volt battery for my 286. The original was one of them tandirum battery.
Original batteries are simply too expensive for my taste, so I went the alternative route.
I cut the original wire off the battery, solderen it to the new battery and swapped the velcro.

(Soldering is fun, when listening to Rammstein 😜 )

brostenen wrote:

(Soldering is fun, when listening to Rammstein 😜 )

doesnt rammstein make you wanna insert the tip under your fingernail?

mrau wrote:

brostenen wrote:

(Soldering is fun, when listening to Rammstein 😜 )

doesnt rammstein make you wanna insert the tip under your fingernail?

That is dark....

mrau wrote:

brostenen wrote:

(Soldering is fun, when listening to Rammstein 😜 )

doesnt rammstein make you wanna insert the tip under your fingernail?

Nope... Why would good diverse and interesting music make me do something that stupid?

brostenen wrote:

Nope... Why would good diverse and interesting music make me do something that stupid?

do you never play with stereotypes?

mrau wrote:

brostenen wrote:

Nope... Why would good diverse and interesting music make me do something that stupid?

do you never play with stereotypes?

Uhmmm... If I play with stereotypes? Hmmm.
Are you asking me, if i socialize with other people that I place into categories?

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I did the MOST exciting "adding" of a 256 k L2 Burst Cache to my Pentium 166 Compaq. I attached some images to show how amazing the whole process was and I'm sure there will be much drooliage and slobbering over what they depict.

MCGA wrote:

I did the MOST exciting "adding" of a 256 k L2 Burst Cache to my Pentium 166 Compaq. I attached some images to show how amazing the whole process was and I'm sure there will be much drooliage and slobbering over what they depict.

The sequence of photos in your post seems to show you removing the cache 🤣 anyway, any noticeable change in performance?

My retro activity has been to test some old IBM gear, an AT and CGA monitor - works great - and fired up GATO for the first time in a long time. Now I have to downgrade DOS from 6.22 to something more appropriate, maybe 3.3.

I put the images in order, but they displayed backwards and I was too lazy to reverse it. 😀

Speaking of DOS 6.22, I just found the CD I got with the 486 I bought months back. It has a legit copy of DOS, Windows for Workgroup 3.11, and all of the drivers for the included cards.

What's GATO?

MCGA wrote:

I put the images in order, but they displayed backwards and I was too lazy to reverse it. 😀

Speaking of DOS 6.22, I just found the CD I got with the 486 I bought months back. It has a legit copy of DOS, Windows for Workgroup 3.11, and all of the drivers for the included cards.

What's GATO?

GATO's a WWII submarine simulator. Last played it in about '85/'86 on a friend's PC or XT (can't remember which he had). Was the first game to make me jealous of owners of color monitors, as my family only had a green mono screen for the Apple II at the time.

Awesome! I don't recall that game, but my brother didn't let me game on his XT about that time, but Youtube makes me want to play it. I played 688 Attack Sub a few years later.

Attended a retro LAN party for a few hours today. Played two games of Age of Empires 1: fun! 🤣

Good setup: 6 Dell notebooks were setup and good to go. Exactly my cup of tea. Just gaming: no BS.

Not computer related but still retro. Check out this 1993 Craig JH6222 I bought off the interwebs a couple of days ago, it was just too 90's to pass up with that font and the teal lettering.
Now I know it's a real cheapo but it was NEW in it's original packaging, so I just had to. 🤣

The foam is still amazingly spongy and soft after 23 years of storage! Also the headphones are pretty neat because the ear pieces are on ball joints so they can move around to fit your ear surprisingly well. 🤣

Played Age of Empires II HD.

Also played a game of Civilization.

Watched how 3dmark06 beating crap out of my A64x2 rig... with 8gb ddr1... under W7 x64